Risto Linturi, Chairman
R. Linturi Plc.
Distinguished audience,
In a recent book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, New York Times foreign columnist Thomas Friedman explains how free movement of money has destroyed various power structures. Many an old dinosaur has given way to the electronic herd. Individuals and funds move money into every promising idea around the world. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and shahs have been turned to American governors who live to serve the market forces. And corporate executives are no longer largest part of those market forces. This is part of information technology and globalisation as you have heard mentioned in previous speeches and various sources before.
Alvin Toffler started his visionary book: “The Third Wave” followingly:
"A new civilization is emerging in our lives and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it!" But in fact this is not just a question of being blind to change. Very often those in power are afraid that they would lose their positions if things change. However as walls are now falling everyplace, it is very hard to resist this turmoil. If you do not run fast enough you will be conquered. Blind men do not run fast.
And just think about how fast you have to run. Very soon mobile phones will be our wallets and movie tickets. Already now I can handle my bank payments with my mobile, I can answer my doorbell and open my door. Few times, when I have been lost, I have received a map into my phone and soon my phone will be able to tell my friends where I am. The most common question in phone: where are you, will become obsolete. With Bluetooth our mobile phones will double as cordless phones, as general remote controls for anything starting from VCR’s and saunas to viewing inside ones fridge. And think about the sparsely populated Finland. It might save half of the money if streetlights would be turned off when the mobile network did not sense anybody near by. Just about anything can be automated and linked to our phones. I must confess that I have become very dependant of my phone and it does not work here – I feel like I have lost one of my senses – globalisation is not complete – many cultural and technological differences still separate us.
But in most things all people are similar. Maslow defined basic human needs. Mobile phones must fulfil one or several of these. Otherwise they could not have succeeded so well all over the world. Basically we are herd or pack animals. You see it clearly when you study how youngsters use mobile phones to be aware of each other’s movements continuously.
Getting accepted as a member of one’s group is very important to us. Mobile phones make us free; they extend our reach. Identity, recognition, saved time, and empowerments are valuable things.
Think about those cultures where bosses do not give out their mobile phone numbers. It is considered degrading for example in US for a boss to answer his or her mobile phone. But this is stupid from the organizations point of view. There is very little added value from a mobile phone if you merely use it for calling. The real value of mobile phones comes from everybody being available when decisions have to be made and it works if people understand how not to bother you when you would not appreciate it. In Finland it seems to work and subordinates frequently inform and ask for advice in critical situations – often with discreet text messages. Organisational intelligence maximizes when all brains are almost telepathically connected.
Finland is very egalitarian society with low hierarchies. We have stories of irritated soldiers shouting their advice to passing generals – and these stories sound true to us. Loyalty to your work in Finland does not mean that you are obedient. Many times it means that you take responsibility and act individually within your network. If your boss wants to take part in making decisions she or he has to answer your phone calls and emails. This was sometimes disastrous in factory environment but beneficial for the new, networked era.
This is perhaps one of the major reasons why both mobile phones and Internet spread so fast in Finland. Other forms of communication were quite efficient for hierarchical organisations. We felt like someone had just set us free from hierarchies when mobile phones and Internet arrived. Everything started to move faster. Currently over 70% of the total population has mobile phones in Finland and over 90% uses phones for text messaging. Over 50% of the population has used the internet – and almost 100% of teenagers. Everybody prints their mobile phone numbers and email-addresses in their visiting cards, everybody keeps their phones open most of the time and telephony costs are amongst the lowest in the world due to competition. We used to have 800 private teleoperators in nineteen twenties.
Many of the inventions in Internet like chat and Linux have originated from Finland. They all seem to view people as actors rather than objects, empowering people and drawing strength from a collaborative effort, which is part of our tradition.
Helsinki Arena 2000 –project, which I am here to describe to you, also draws its strength from high regard for individuals. It is not a project as such. It has acted as a catalyst for many projects and many companies. Originally we compared it to Kennedy’s vision to put a man on moon. This kind of self-replicating ideas, stories that spread easily are called memes, originally described by a Dr. Dawkin in his book the Selfish Gene.
In Helsinki Arena 2000 (www.arenanet.fi) I crafted basically three sets of memes. The most important first: With a good local multimedia network anyone can start broadcasting TV-quality programs to everybody else. Second: With virtual reality technologies and self-positioning mobile phones we can always be aware of our surroundings and we never again get lost. Third: With always-online connections to our homes and offices, we can remotely monitor and operate all our belongings.
I started consulting Helsinki Telephone, current Elisa Communications in 1995. I was asked to figure out what to do with the fixed network when speech would move to mobile networks. In addition I was expected to evangelise the high tech profile of Helsinki Telephone.
Any new strategy for Helsinki Telephone Corp. would have required a major change in behaviour patterns of the Telecom Company, its suppliers, and customers. I went back to study Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. What were the needs that could be satisfied with modern technology and how could I best communicate my vision to catalyse as fast a change as possible towards my goals?
Generally media considered it very valuable for people to be able to view their favourite movies or news whenever they wanted. In 1995 it was also commonly believed that content would become very important for operators because bit transfer would become almost free. I wanted to disagree with both arguments. I wanted to create a system where creating and distributing content would be as easy as possible.
Because of the advent of mass production, mass market, and mass media our western civilization resembles old Roman circus where those who had power created entertainment for those who were followers.
We are in crossroads and our future may lead to even more mass entertainment where less and less people contribute in any meaningful way.
The other path leads to an open society where hierarchies are low and communication routes are symmetrical. In this open society everybody is expected to contribute and take part in creating content. In this path, content is created for smaller groups and financed by mutual interest and very seldom financed by advertisements. It is good to notice that the more any country can produce information the sounder economic basis it has in this information age. Enabling the citizen to produce is much more valuable overall than to enable them to receive.
When I started in 1995, one of the first intentions was to create motivation for a fast acceptance of ISDN as a stepping-stone towards fixed fast DSL access. All sorts of increase in personal video communication would increase demand for higher bandwidth connections. Digital subscriber line - ISDN in Finland has now reached my predictions. ISDN enables video telephony, which is now spreading to households. Ten largest Finnish telecoms now distribute Vistacom’s video telephony software as a part of their ISDN connection.
Targeting multimedia distribution schemes proved to be much more difficult. In 1995 Helsinki Telephone had successfully conducted one of Europe’s largest Video on Demand field trials. But I did not believe in video on demand.
Now it is time to use Maslow’s help. Very often when we create products we do not study enough what the really fundamental needs are. Continuously we repeat that content is the king. But if you study human behaviour you will notice that we are much more willing to pay for the possibility to express ourselves and less inclined to pay for the possibility to just view and listen to others. We will spend even more time and effort for the possibility to share experiences with our fellow beings.
I wanted to turn the TV-concept and Video on Demand concept upside down. We started building a DSL-based broadband island of Internet in Helsinki where anyone could start a TV-quality multicast transmission for others to view. Think about a member in an MG Club. He might send an email to other members saying: “Tomorrow at six pm I will change my carburettor. If you want to view and listen to my explanation, please connect to my homepage video channel.”
What you now see in the background is my own home video that I took three weeks ago from Tanzania where we climbed mount Kilimanjaro with my wife after studying globalization, poverty and local wildlife. They have lots of Internet cafes there – and local people are beginning to utilize new technologies to market their services abroad. But let us return to turning video on demand concepts upside down.
I believe that someone wants to put a camera in front of her goldfish bowl. There might be more than ten people who like it better than what comes from the TV. There are so many who would say that producing good quality TV-programs is difficult. It is really difficult if you want to get enough people interested in something that actually does not interest them to really get the advertisers interested. It is not so difficult to get grandparents interested in kids birthday parties or fans of a specific dog breed to get interested in their specific dog show. And finally - is it really more valuable to view a program than participate in creating it? Mobile telephony is great business with one person talking and one other listening. There is no question of quality of content; it is a question of people interacting. Life is not a spectator sport; life is participatory. There are horror stories of the future where we can tape even the feelings of actors and replay everything to the viewers. Then one could be placed into a cyber coffin, connected to tubes and then set to follow and feel someone else’s life. Those people might be happy but they would not have a life anymore. And this is not so far as you would think. According to statistics, one third of the wakeup time of Americans is spent watching the TV. Nothing happens in your brain when watching a typical American TV-program. People do not relax – according to some research it resembles coma. One third of all Americans are all the time shut down because they do not feel that they are needed.
I know that we do not need one hundred lousy TV channels instead of five good ones. We need to belong. With a network where anyone can transmit, the web changes from a radio into a non-hierarchical group video telephony concept. This has already happened with homepages, emails, news- and chat rooms.
Naturally we have had difficulties when trying to create a network for enabling everyone to transmit efficiently. Current networks optimise for hierarchical top down transmission where ADSL is the most clear sign but not the only one. The network manufacturers like Cisco and others were not ready for open multicast and billing schemes that were needed to guarantee good quality video throughput and usage control. These communication patterns are also difficult to set up because of the hen and egg problem. But it seems that the project is on the right track and the business model seems as sound as ever.
However since 1995 I have been disappointed at how many blind men there are. Naturally many understand and support, but one operator, and dozens of journalists are unable by themselves to change the world. Old beliefs and customs are hard to break. Suppliers believe more in the hierarchical mass media model because that is what most operators wish for. Operators also believe in the hierarchical model because that is what most equipment manufacturers and media houses support. Lately there have been many advances but still progress is slower than I anticipated. And in US, media and operators seem to merge, falling even further from openness.
But let us return to Maslow, our basic needs, and our second issue at hand. I have trouble remembering names and numbers and I occasionally get lost even in Helsinki. And it is always difficult to use a map. We needed a flagship user interface for the Helsinki Arena 2000 –project. It needed to be such that people could feel they belong there. Let me now show you what we ended up with.
What you will now see is Helsinki or rather a virtual replica of Helsinki. By the end of this year we will have 50 square kilometres ready modelled by Arcus Software in Finland. Since 1996 Arcus (www.arcussoft.com) has been developing the tools for fast and light modelling of a lively virtual city to be used in computer networks and mobile phones to assist navigation and collaboration in physical and virtual cities.
In this model you can go to any door, push the doorbell and it will connect a regular telephone call to the phone in the respective physical location. I managed even to patent this feature. Point to a location to make a phone call there. I was afraid that it could not be patented but it could. It may happen that the patent office will be the biggest single thing slowing progress in the future. If it were true that gasoline companies hold most of the patents to electrical cars then the slow development of them would make sense - at least from the gasoline companies’ viewpoint.
But I strayed from my virtual city. There are various technologies to get the co-ordinates of a bus or a pizza-taxi and even any package delivery status in real time to be displayed in this model. If I wanted a taxi, I would just jump higher, look for the closest free taxi and click with my mouse. Then I would see how it starts turning to my direction and just when it is about to reach my door I would step out to the rain - and if it got lost I could double-click it and get a direct call.
I really remember less that 50 telephone numbers and I find maps very difficult. But most people recognise something between 100.000 and one million places because that is how we are built. Pattern recognition used to be a survival skill.
Kainuu is another part of Finland being modelled right now. They have bears and some of them have GPS-radio collars. We plan to show their positions in the virtual model. Then it is easier to avoid accidentally meeting a bear and naturally wolves should also carry tracers. Many reindeers in Lapland already have mobile phones.
With mobile phones showing 3D-visualizations and locations - it will be easier than ever to move around in the physical realm. One more of Maslow’s needs fulfilled.
Virtual reality will enable us to see what we wish whether based on physical reality or not. We may get rid of road and traffic signs as they can all be viewed virtually from mobile phones and electronic windshields. A technician can see in his augmented reality glasses where he is supposed to put his hands next. And in the future – think about the sparsely populated Finland where everybody has mobile phones. The streetlights can be turned off when there are no mobile phones near by.
In Arcus Software, which is the company doing this modelling; there are plans to model all Finland. Mobile phones with satellite positioning devices have been announced for this year’s delivery. Mobile operators have announced services for them, which guarantees us that we get many things moving in our virtual reality and we can give very good service to users, as they will easily supply us their position. It will be easier than ever to move around in the physical realm.
And remember that this model is not just 3D-visualisation. We can deliver the same information verbally and with 2D façade pictures or on flat maps when necessary. The essential thing is that we have all this information available when needed. I have noticed that in Japan and especially Tokyo these kinds of navigational 3D maps are rather advanced but they seem to be tied to specific manufacturers devices. I believe that later the more communicative systems will evolve enabling open interaction.
There is a very big conceptual change coming with xDSL, GPRS and other forms of communication that allow for always on-type connections. Many existing devices can be replaced by application services used from various Internet terminals. Many parts of the service industry will also be restructured when Internet enabled devices automatically call for information, updates, replacements or other nearby assistance.
Let us get into the third issue: There is a rumour that I can answer my doorbell and open my front door with my mobile phone. I am also supposed to view the insides of my fridge from my mobile phone and receive fire and burglary alarms. These are examples of the memes that I used to spread the ideas. We need cheap fixed always-on Internet connections to homes and we need ideas that drive this development forward. My memes spread widely to the international media and finally this year all major Finnish construction companies announced plans to wire up all new homes and start supplying the homes with building automation related Internet services. Many of the construction companies’ concepts have been assisted by our project and later developed together with Lonix (www.lonix.fi), a Finnish automation manufacturer connecting light bulbs to mobile phones and the Internet. Next Monday when I return to Helsinki, we have a press conference announcing a joint consortium project to create a common standard for connecting mobile phones to building automation.
When Bluetooth phones become available, it will become practical to use mobile phones as general purpose remote controllers for all building related functions whether really remote or just few meters away. I can ask my phone to automatically switch on a certain radio station, put on the lights and open locks wherever I move and turn them off when I leave. But I also want to remotely ask my VCR to tape some program for me if I am unexpectedly late. This is easy to engineer if everything is always connected to Internet. Essential to the initial goal was that there would be as many useful ways to utilize always-on home connections, that there was something for everyone. And we wanted as many companies as possible developing various value added applications on top of the communications networks.
Internet and mobile phones do not only change technology – they also affect the society as a whole. Many power structures may fall in spite of all regulations supporting them. It is easy to realize that there was a communist system in Eastern Europe and it fell down. It is more difficult to realize that the capitalist world also has a system and it is not called free market. A state is a power structure, which is financed by collecting taxes from exchanges inside the state boarders. Future bit realm will be important but it will not know any physical state boarders. It is outside all current states in most practical aspects. Just imagine how easy it would be to search for remote work in Internet.
If I found some job waiting for me in Internet I could work for a few hours and then if everything were okay I would receive payment for what I managed to accomplish. I would not necessarily have any idea on where my employer is located and they would not know who I was or what was my nationality. If I spent the just earned bit-money in Internet then no outsider knew that anything at all had happened.
There are strong signs indicating that states are losing their capability to independently finance their operation or enforce their decisions. Simultaneously as the boarders are becoming meaningless there have to be rules that are enforceable globally. This will lead to weakening of states and creation of a world bank, a world police and other international regulatory bodies getting more and more power.
Copies are cheaper than ever. But good ideas have a free market. This makes organisational creativity and empathy and speed the most essential success factors. If you only copy what others do and if you don’t understand what others value, if you cannot put your act together faster than others, then you are not worth much. If you are fast enough, you win because in our new economy, things become more valuable the more they spread; this is the law of increasing return.
New possibilities must be taken into serious consideration when they are just possibilities. Nokia made their great success by being the first company to believe in digital mobile phones and they also sensed that their customers wanted to have individualized phones. It is funny to notice that Toffler had written about this concept in 1981, but Nokia was the first major company to view their customers as Toffler recommended. Most of the others are in Japan. You might have heard that Nokia was regarded as a Japanese company until three years ago when the Finnish connection started getting more and more publicity.
But enough of the past. Many of our visions for the future are not radical enough. Currently many people think that cars will be equipped with Internet. Radical would be to believe that cars will get off ground because of computerization and communications. We just ordered one Skycar from Moller International for 2004 delivery. I have also been very interested in Aerovironment who has created Helios, a flying wing that will stay six months in 20 kilometres using solar panels and accumulators. Teleoperators should take this seriously. That kind of device is considerably cheaper than communications satellites but combines the benefits of very low orbit satellites and geostationary ones. They will offer 20 Gigabits local broadband capacity each. Nasa is backing the development and a consortium of Taiwanese operators has ordered one test system.
Many of these developments open new markets. Bits become cheaper but we will learn to use more of them and the total value of bit transfer will continue to grow if we learn to run fast enough. Protective approaches, which do not aim towards customers’ benefit and open competition, are destined to collapse. I have recently read some thirty business plans. Investors seem to be quite willing to give five million dollar valuations to five-month-old start-ups with nothing else but a good business plan. How can you keep good people in-house if there is a free market? Microsoft recently announced worlds biggest option plan to avoid mass exit.
I boldly compared Helsinki Arena - project to Kennedy’s plan to put a man on the moon. Our project was not as expensive but it filled many people with joint new visions. Corporations, cities and countries need high profile missions to give their people a sense of identity and self esteem. A sense of belonging to a group that one can be proud of. Still in 1995 Finnish people had a very low self-esteem. Helsinki Arena 2000 was among the first information technology projects to change this attitude. It opened many doors, created alignment of vision and a co-operative attitude. It has even affected our legislation. My first task in the project was to gather a consortium to support the project. We got all local art and science universities, largest bank, largest media house, largest edp-houses including IBM and Fujitsu, Nokia, the National Technology Agency, and the City of Helsinki to participate.
What has been accomplished so far? The project has successfully transferred its own goals to several divisions of the Telco and other companies and organizations as part of their actual businesses. It still takes time until the original vision is a reality for everyone, but many concepts have been taken into commercial usage in accelerated schedules. And the whole thinking has changed towards significant futuristic ways of using the new communications technologies to everybody benefit.
Now during the past five years technology has advanced again. Perhaps in the future fixed wires are not necessary but currently they are still the cheapest means if monopolistic corporations do not hold them. New technologies may be needed sooner if this is the case and if legislator cannot create competition as they did in Finland.
Whatever happens, we will see information technology assisting businesses to produce us cheaper things and delivering them to us with faster and cheaper, more automated methods. We will also see technology running astray getting us addicted, robbing us of our independence or spoiling our environment. We will also see technology assisting us to talk with each other silently. One of my latest memes was actually that I have invented telepathy. Just connect sensors and a speech analyser to your vocal chords and a speech synthesiser to your mobile phone. Then shut your mouth but continue to sub vocalise. You will have telepathy and it will be embedded to our children’s skulls. This is not certain, but certainly we use our mobile phones to pay instead of cash or credit cards. And which is more important, we will accept payments to our mobile phones and then we get rid of all cash. Even the beggars then need mobile phones. And certainly our phones in the future will remember everything and allow us to have perfect recollection of what we see and hear. We will become empowered as individuals; our world will become transparent – allowing those in powers very little room for misconduct.
This will spread to many currently underdeveloped countries also. After the first pioneering efforts, new information technology is cheaper than the old technologies. Besides, distances and boarders will finally become meaningless in the virtual realm. Geographical boarders are also forms of hierarchies separating people and restricting their possibilities.
I wish you a pleasant journey – sea is getting rough, but communications technologies can do miracles for the benefit of the whole society. If we use the information technology for viewing, we will certainly get the possibility to immerse in our own private virtual kingdoms with pleasant virtual servants – many people will get addicted with virtual reality. When the computers learn to see us and recognise our facial expressions – then many of us are totally lost from others. But if you love virtual reality more than other people – thet does not inherit and the next generation will be better. They will care for other people and they will use communication technology to increase togetherness and community feeling. Remember Maslow and our basic needs. Many thanks for your patience.